by Jim Emerson (Reel.com)

Passing through Customs and Immigration in Toronto involves more red tape and bureaucratic cross-examination than anyplace I've ever gone — Egypt, Turkey, India, Greece, Hong Kong, Germany (before the Wall came down) — I don't know why this is. I live in Seattle where you can drive across the border into Vancouver, B.C., anytime, and you barely have to decrease your speed at the border to roll down your window and answer a couple of questions. It's easier than negotiating the drive-thru window at Taco Bell. So, while standing in line for an hour at the Toronto airport, waiting for someone to pull me into a cubicle to interrogate me about why I'd checked BOTH "Business" and "Pleasure" on my Customs Declaration Form, I kept wondering: Who wants to sneak into Canada, fer Chrissakes?

Well, the truth is, this time of year, all sorts of disreputable characters (movie geeks, filmmakers, studio execs, actors) head north of the border for the Toronto International Film Festival — which has grown into (arguably) North America's premiere movie showcase. The folks in Canadian Customs could take a few lessons from the Festival staff. Even though they show more than 300 individual films, and present roughly 100 programs each day, from 8 a.m. to midnight, for 11 days straight (about half of them public screenings; the other half press and industry screenings), the Toronto Festival is one of the friendliest, most efficient, and best-organized I've seen in 20 years of festival-going. (I'm a festival crank, too — I gave up on Sundance after 1987 because I thought it had become too overblown and Hollywood-ized, and that was two years before sex, lies, and videotape. As one Very Well-Known Film Critic said to me about last year's Sundance Film Fiasco, "Why should I go to any film festival that makes it more difficult for me to see movies?" It was a rhetorical question.)

Speaking of sex, lies, and videotape, my 1999 Toronto experience got off to a dandy start with a morning screening of Steven Soderbergh's juicy The Limey. What a joy it is — and a rare one, too — to see a real director at work, somebody whose every composition, every cut, every move is made not only with intelligence but with wit, elan, and an intuitive understanding of the expressive properties of the movies. Watching The Limey, you realize how many movies are just about pointing the camera at the actors and then cutting around the "coverage" because, well, it's there. Like last year's terrific Out of Sight, The Limey begins at a pivotal moment and then flashes forward and back — fracturing time, memory, and fantasy — to tell its tale in a manner that's probably a much more accurate representation of the way human beings experience temporal reality than a straightforward narrative. Terrence Stamp stars as the eponymous Brit, a real halibut-out-of-water ex-con who comes to L.A. to find out about the death of his daughter in a flaming car accident off Mulholland Drive. His dated prison slang makes him incomprehensible to the Angelenos he meets, and the movie emphasizes his (often comic) dislocation with jump cuts and by keeping him almost continually isolated in the frame. Peter Fonda is a treat, too, as a sleazy former rock promoter. Is that redundant?

In stark contrast (and let's be sure to emphasize the word "stark") to the nimble wit and intelligence of The Limey stands Snow Falling On Cedars, a slicker-than-slush, Designer-Crafted Entertainment brought to you by David Guterson's best-selling novel, director and co-writer Scott Hicks (Shine), director of photography Robert Richardson (JFK, Natural Born Killers), and perhaps most of all (though this is pure speculation) the dreaded melodramatist Ron Bass (Rain Man, Joy Luck Club) who served as co-producer and co-writer with Hicks (or re-writer — there's no ampersand between their names, which would indicate that they wrote together). The movie is set in post-WWII, pre-global warming Washington State, where everything is a lovely shade of either gray, white, blue, or green. If it were set in the Deep South, it might be called or Another Time to Kill or Mississipi's Burning Again, since it's another bombastic picture-postcard about a white guy who rescues ethnic minorities from the Evils of Prejudice. Does that glib synopsis sound like a gross oversimplification? On the contrary: I may actually be reading too much into this movie.

The story is pure To Kill a Mockingbird. A Japanese-American man is accused of the murder of a white man. The accused is not only a very decent, attractive fellow with a lovely wife, Hatsue (Yuki Kudoh) and child, he's also a decorated US Army war hero. So, you know damn well he's not guilty. As an innocent pube, Hatsue used to cavort under the not-so-snowy cedars with the son (Ethan Hawke) of the local Crusty Liberal Paragon newspaper editor (Sam Shepard), but she dumped him for A Boy Of Her Own Kind while she and her entire family were in a relocation camp during the war. This is the kind of movie where every person is either Totally Good or Totally Evil — except for the hero, who has A Flaw, which he must learn to overcome. And his Flaw is just as unbelievable as the ideological purity of the other characters.

The movie lectures the audience about the nature of journalism and criminal trials: Neither is really about finding "The Truth" — choices are made, events are manipulated, certain elements are included or emphasized and others are left out entirely. I felt this was a message to the audience from the filmmakers. Maybe some of the pedantic card-stacking, the cardboard characterizations, and wretched dialogue had come straight from the book. (When the Flawed Hero, serving his country overseas in the Great War, receives a Dear John letter from Hatsue, he is then promptly wounded in combat, and his reaction — delivered directly to the audience and no one else — is: "F***ing Jap bitch!") Time and again while sitting through this film, I wanted to rise from my seat and yell back at the screen: "Why didn't you leave that out!?!?!" Then again, this is just about the level of moral complexity we have come to expect from famous script-polisher Bass, who is often brought in to assure that no screenplay transgresses or transcends the formulae propounded by the likes of Syd Field or Robert McKee. And that's all this movie is, really: a mathematical formula, with pictures.

Oh, but did I mention how pretty those pictures are? Let's see: The snow is pretty. The cedars are pretty. The water is pretty. The fog is pretty. The drowning is pretty. The corpses are pretty. The battle scenes and dismemberments are pretty. Doggone it, everything is just as pretty as it can possibly be. You couldn't find a better contrast with The Limey: Whereas every decision, every composition, every cut that Soderbergh makes is done to further an idea or an emotion, in Snow Falling on Cedars, everything exists for one reason alone: to be pretty. Oh, and to remind us all that racial prejudice is not a good thing. I began to wonder if Scott Hicks and Ron Bass were the uncredited authors (or auteurs, if you will) of Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign….

I suppose if you tried hard enough, you could talk yourself into being offended by something in Kevin Smith's Dogma (as some reportedly are already). Like the excrement monster, maybe. But if you're going to object on religious grounds, you'd really have to be equally offended by half the science fiction and adventure movies that have ever come out of Hollywood, including The Matrix and Star Wars. Dogma is a variation on the classic story (eons older than the Bible) about the hero/heroine embarking on a quest and, in the process, discovering his/her true identity and fulfilling his/her destiny. Only this one's slightly different from its predecessors in two respects: a) it calls its characters by different names, many of them rooted in Christian tradition; and b) it has more fart jokes.

Like its primary literary source (the Bible — Old and New Testaments), Dogma is a parable (or a jumble of parables), and as such was never intended to be taken literally. So if you feel the need to argue that there really was no 13th apostle named Rufus (played by Chris Rock in the movie), then you're just missing the point so badly that there's really nothing to argue about. Besides, Rufus says he was written out of later editions of the Bible by church politicians because he was black, and so … OK, you either get it or you don't.

The story has to do with a pair of fallen angels (buddies Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) who find a loophole in Catholic dogma that will allow them to re-enter the Kingdom of Heaven — and wipe out all of existence in the process. A divorced abortion clinic worker (Linda Fiorentino) is persuaded by a tequila-spitting angel (Alan Rickman) to help save the universe, and she is assisted by a pair of familiar prophets known as Jay and Silent Bob. Smith's first feature, Clerks, was so pathetically desperate for shock-laughs that, on the basis of that movie alone, I was willing to believe that Kevin Smith was the Antichrist of comedy (and not Adam Sandler or Pauly Shore). But I thoroughly enjoyed Dogma, which you might call a gross-out comedy of ideas. Yes, it gets a bit belabored in spots (not just the storytelling but the poo-poo jokes, too), and I think Smith still panders for cheap laughs and then hypocritically pretends to judge his characters for stooping so low. But Dogma is really a sweet and sentimental epic adventure about finding faith and breaking wind.

If the Catholic Church is going to get upset about a movie, it might do better to fret about Third Miracle, directed by the Pope's countrywoman Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden, Washington Square) — not for any kind of blasphemy, but for its investigation of the politics behind the Church's saint-making machinery. It's like a sausage factory — the process by which the product is manufactured isn't terribly pretty. Ed Harris plays a priest who, although questioning his own faith in his calling, comes to believe in the miracles said to have been performed by a deceased woman who is now being considered a candidate for sainthood. Three confirmed miracles are required for canonization. Anne Heche, as the daughter the woman abandoned for God, and Harris work miracles themselves in performances that are (as usual for these actors) astonishing, vivid, and heartbreakingly honest.

The same can be said for Liev Schreiber and Ned Beatty in Spring Forward, written and directed by Tom Gilroy, that is based upon a totally radical concept in contemporary filmmaking — conversation. Tracing the development of a friendship between two parks department workers over the course of a year, Spring Forward is gift from heaven for its actors — and its audience. Think of it as a blue-collar My Dinner With Andre (which is exactly what I'll bet the marketing people are thinking at this very moment). Take two first-rate actors and let them actually talk to each other, rather than spew pop-culture-laced dialogue past each other in juicy monologues, and the result is almost unspeakably gratifying. Not only is it a joy to just hang out with these guys, but they actually say things that are worth saying, and they do it by listening as well as talking.